If you're looking into building a recruitment tool, you’re lucky. The labor market is full of challenges.
To fill an open position, recruiters have to wade through dozens of resumes and social media profiles. Once they find promising candidates, they need to contact them, keep track of the responses, and schedule interviews. Recruiters need to prepare for every interview so they don’t waste anybody's time. During interviews, they need to assess the candidate's qualifications to make sure they're the right fit for the company.
Sourcing candidates, conducting interviews, and communicating with prospects is time-consuming. Hiring managers are often under pressure to hire quickly. But on average, it takes 40 days to fill an open position in the US.
The labor market is competitive, with many recruiters chasing the same candidates. The best candidates are off the market in 10 days, according to a survey by WorkConnect.
Recruiters can't afford to spend that much time on hiring. What can software developers do to solve these challenges?
SaaS recruitment systems can whittle down the hiring process. In this article we'll talk about how recruitment software can solve the challenges that hiring managers face.
How SaaS recruitment software works
The main purpose of SaaS-based recruitment systems is to improve the efficiency of recruitment. The recruitment process has four stages: sourcing, engaging, selecting, and hiring.
We’ll look at the market for recruitment tools from the point of view of recruitment stages. Which stage in the hiring process do you think is the most attractive for software vendors? Let's find out!
The sourcing stage: how recruitment systems improve the efficiency of recruitment
Sourcing potential employees involves developing job descriptions, posting ads on job boards, reviewing CVs, and talking to candidates.
Sourcing doesn't only take time. It's also expensive. According to a Human Capital Benchmarking report, the cost per hire in the US amounts to $4,000. This is three times the amount that most US companies spend on training an employee.
Artificial intelligence solutions for sourcing help companies hire employees much faster and cheaper. We looked at the Ideal, Scout, and Arya AI recruitment platforms. Here are two core values they provide for recruiters:
1. Automated sourcing
To find candidates, AI systems look for information on many sources. Or they use their own databases. Ideal, for example, searches candidates from CareerBuilder and ZipRecruiter and selects candidates based on job descriptions. When Scout finds a suitable candidate, it creates an easy-to-read profile for a recruiter. This profile highlights the most relevant skills and experience in the candidate's resume. Just imagine how easy it is for recruiters to do their jobs using these short profiles.
2. Candidate engagement
AI solutions reach out to selected candidates using emails or chatbots to ask further questions and invite candidates for job interviews.
Automated sourcing, resume screening, and initial shortlisting are just some use cases for AI and machine learning.
You can use AI to discover behavior patterns and assess candidates based on analysis of their social profiles. You can also apply AI to track talent pools and predict when candidates are likely to change jobs. This can help recruiters discover the right people even before they start the job search.
The engagement stage: How CRM systems for recruitment improve the candidate experience and company reputation
Сompetition for candidates is one of the biggest challenges in the labor market. The demand for qualified employees is higher than the supply. At the same time, the market of active job seekers is much smaller than the actual number of people interested in a new job. According to OfficeVibe, 75% of professionals are passive job seekers.
A positive brand is what every recruiter needs to increase their chances of hiring a qualified professional. One way to develop a positive brand is to create pools of passive candidates and maintain relationships with them.
Candidate relationship management (CRM) software helps recruiters engage with candidates. Similar to marketing automation systems, CRM software lets recruiters build a pipeline and automate candidate engagement.
CRM systems allow hiring managers to track email campaigns and schedule interviews. They send reminders to recruiters about doing evaluations after interviews and providing feedback to candidates.
Examples of CRM systems for recruitment include Yello and PhenomPeople. The main value of CRM is in building relationships with employees, which translates into more and better hires.
The selection stage: How recruiting platforms that assess candidates help companies avoid bad hires
Remember how much it costs to hire an employee? The cost of a bad hire is scarier. According to the US Department of Labor, companies end up paying at least 30 percent of an employee's first-year earnings for a bad hire.
Investing that much money in the wrong person isn't only a bad idea, it's a threat to the business. What can you do to help companies make better hiring decisions? The answer is develop software that defines who’s the best match for the job by providing testing and assessment functionality.
According to Aberdeen, 57% of companies use pre-hire assessments to test the knowledge, skills, and abilities of their candidates. Vendors of candidate assessment tools are in high demand, and there’s a lot of innovation in this space.
For example, a startup called Pymetrics uses neuroscience and AI algorithms to find the best people for the job.
Recruiters often choose people based on their skin color, age, or what popular companies they’ve worked at before. Pymetrics eliminates the bias found in traditional recruitment.
Here’s how it works: managers ask their best employees to play Pymetrics’ neuroscience games. These games assess memory, risk-taking, empathy, fairness, and focus. After that, candidates play the same game. They get scored by the AI, not by humans. As a result, Pymetrics recommends hiring people who scored similarly to the company's best workers.
Predictive Index (PI), another assessment solution, also uses a scientific approach to screening candidates. To set cognitive and behavioral targets, a hiring manager takes a job assessment. They can attach this assessment to job ads or send it directly to candidates. Then the hiring manager can review how candidates stack up to the original requirements and make a hiring decision by comparing job assessment results.
One more bright example of job search website for candidate assessment is HireVue, a video-based job interview platform. HireVue uses artificial intelligence to assess candidates based on their speech, facial expressions, and body language.
The hiring stage: Applicant tracking systems are the biggest category of recruiting software
The majority of large enterprise companies use an applicant tracking system (ATS). This is the most popular category of software among recruitment software vendors. An ATS can be installed on a company's own computers and servers or can be offered as a cloud-based solution.
An ATS offers full-fledged recruitment and hiring management functionality. Bullhorn, GreenHouse, SmartRecruiters, and Lever are some examples of popular applicant tracking systems. Their functionality usually includes the following:
1. Planning the hiring process
Applicant tracking systems allow recruiters to create pools of candidates and plan hiring. Recruiters can specify criteria for each position such as skills, traits, and qualifications, and can create interview plans.
2. Sourcing
Tracking systems allow hiring managers to post positions on job boards and share them on social networks. They also provide functionality for managing candidate referrals and offer keyword-based filters that search for candidates by comparing resumes to posted job descriptions.
3. Interviewing
An ATS allows recruiters to schedule interviews, score candidates, and manage the hiring pipeline. To make the process easier, an ATS can integrate with calendars such as Outlook, Google Calendar, and iCal as well as Gmail and LinkedIn.
4. Analytics
Analytics embedded in applicant tracking systems allow organizations to make informed decisions about recruiting and hiring. They offer graphs, interactive reports, and even predictive analytics. Recruiting data allow hiring managers to get answers to their most important questions: Who can I get on board the fastest? Where do candidates drop off? What characterises rejected and successful applicants?
Consider the target audience for your recruitment software
As you can see, the market for recruitment software is large and diverse. To create recruitment solution, you need to consider your target audience.
For example, a system for large enterprise companies needs to integrate with existing HR and ERP systems. Large organizations also value application portals, internal job boards, and website builders for branded career pages.
Recruiting agencies need a solution that can store large candidate pools. They also appreciate candidate relationship management functionality.
Small and medium-sized businesses can benefit from simple but scalable systems. They need tools that address specific hiring challenges.
How to differentiate yourself in the recruitment software market
Features offered by recruitment systems are often fairly standard. To differentiate your product, you need to offer a solution that provides a better customer experience, a variety of integrations, and a simple user interface. A great solution for recruitment:
- Accelerates the recruitment process;
- Uses AI algorithms to sort through candidates and evaluate resumes;
- Allows recruiters to connect with candidates on any device;
- Saves recruiters’ time with automation;
- Is cloud-based, scalable, and upgrades itself when required.
Develop recruitment software with SteelKiwi
SteelKiwi has experience designing and developing recruiting software. Read more about our expertise here.
